Burning Cole

Posted on Jun 21, 2006

Politics trumped academic integrity, says Nation writer Philip Weiss, when a neocon network torpedoed the appointment of Mideast scholar and blogger Juan Cole to a faculty position at Yale.

Philip Weiss at The Nation:

Neoconservatism is an elite calling. It thrives in think tanks, not union halls; its proponents want most of all to influence the powerful. No wonder Ivy League labels have always been important to neocons. This fixation on intellectual prestige explains the recent neocon uprising over the possibility that Juan Cole, scholar and blogger, would become a Yale professor. It was one thing for Cole to hold forth from the University of Michigan, where he has been a professor for twenty years. But Yale would provide “honor” and “imprimatur,” says Scott Johnson, a right-wing blogger. “That’s a huge thing, to have them bless all his rantings on that blog.”

On June 2 Johnson broke the story (on powerlineblog.com) that Yale’s Senior Appointments Committee had the day before rejected Cole after three other Yale committees had signed off on him. By then a process that usually takes place behind closed doors had become thoroughly politicized by the right. “I’m saddened and distressed by the news,” John Merriman, a Yale history professor, said of the rejection. “I love this place. But I haven’t seen something like this happen at Yale before. In this case, academic integrity clearly has been trumped by politics.”